“11.4%: What the U.S. unemployment rate would be if labor force participation were back to January 2008 levels.” …James Pethokoukis, American Enterprise Institute, June 2013

“Over the last six months, of the net job creation, 97 percent of that is part-time work,”…Keith Hall, former BLS chief

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”…George Orwell, “1984″

Citizen Wells has extensively covered the true employment and labor force situation in this country.

Zero Hedge has interptreted the latest BLS report on family employment.

Hats off to them.

From Zero Hedge April 29, 2014.

“The Real Unemployment Rate: In 20% Of American Families, Everyone Is Unemployed”

“According to shocking new numbers that were just released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20 percent of American families do not have a single person that is working. So when someone tries to tell you that the unemployment rate in the United States is about 7 percent, you should just laugh. One-fifth of the families in the entire country do not have a single member with a job. That is absolutely astonishing. How can a family survive if nobody is making any money? Well, the answer to that question is actually quite easy. There is a reason why government dependence has reached epidemic levels in the United States. Without enough jobs, tens of millions of additional Americans have been forced to reach out to the government for help. At this point, if you can believe it, the number of Americans getting money or benefits from the federal government each month exceeds the number of full-time workers in the private sector by more than 60 million.

When I was growing up, it seemed like anyone that was willing to work hard could find a good paying job. But now that has all changed. At this point, 20 percent of all the families in the entire country do not have a single member that has a job. That includes fathers, mothers and children. The following is how CNSNews.com broke down the numbers…

A family, as defined by the BLS, is a group of two or more people who live together and who are related by birth, adoption or marriage. In 2013, there were 80,445,000 families in the United States and in 16,127,000—or 20 percent–no one had a job.
To be honest, these really are Great Depression-type numbers. But over the years “unemployment” has been redefined so many times that it doesn’t mean the same thing that it once did. The government tells us that the official unemployment rate is about 7 percent, but that number is almost meaningless at this point.

A number that I find much more useful is the employment-population ratio. According to the employment-population ratio, the percentage of working age Americans that actually have a job has been below 59 percent for more than four years in a row…”

“And what is even more frightening is that more families are falling out of the middle class every single day. As a recent CNN article explained, approximately one-third of all U.S. households are living “hand-to-mouth”. In other words, they are constantly living on the edge of financial disaster…

About one-third of American households live “hand-to-mouth,” meaning that they spend all their paychecks. But what surprised the study authors is that 66% of these families are middle class, with a median income of $41,000. While they don’t have liquid assets, such as savings accounts or mutual fund holdings, they do have homes and retirement accounts, with a median net worth of $41,000.

“We don’t expect them to be living paycheck to paycheck,” said Greg Kaplan, study co-author and assistant professor of economics at Princeton University.

“The share of families with an employed member was unchanged at 80.0 percent in 2013. The likelihood of having an employed family member rose in 2013 for Asian families (to 88.8 percent) and for Hispanic families (to 85.1 percent). The likelihood for white and black families showed little or no change (80.1 percent and 75.7 percent, respectively).”